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 Elon
University's School of Communications is taking one of its most-important
final steps toward accreditation this fall. A team from the Accrediting
Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications will
be on campus to assess Elon's program Oct. 23-26.
The team chair
will be Terry Hynes, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications
at the University of Florida and former president of AEJMC. She
could be considered an expert at this, as she has chaired 17 site
visits and her own university is undergoing a reaccredition bid
this fall.
Team members
will include Hubert Brown, an associate professor (broadcast) in
the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse; Jan Quarles,
assistant dean of the College of Mass Communication at Middle Tennessee
State and a veteran in public relations and international communications;
and Rich Archbold, executive editor of the Long Beach (Calif.) Press-Telegram
and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
School of Communications
administrators, support staff and faculty members have assembled
a thorough self-study over the past year, and it will be an important
introduction to the program for the ACEJMC assessment team. Dean
Paul Parsons and former Associate Dean Brad Hamm did the bulk of
the work, with vital input from department chairs Don Grady and
Connie Book and administrative staff members Phyllis Phillips, Pam
Baker and Brittain Cheek.
"The report
contains a number of tantalizing pieces of information," Parsons
reported. "For example, did you know that the School of Communications
attracts 80 percent of its students from out of state, while the
rest of the university attracts just two-thirds from out of state?
We are the academic home of particularly large numbers of students
from Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We hadn't
known this before."
Preparation
for accreditation assessment is key content in the annual faculty
retreat, held Aug. 18 and 19, including a discussion of the self-study
report and a review for updating of faculty sections.
The final self-study
document will be submitted to members of the site-visit team in
early September.
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